The Analogue camera was one of 2 on a palette of Samsung VHS "returns" (it wasn't Samsung though [edit WRONG, it was]) I was repairing for a friend back in 1997 approx. The dead camera the boards had come loose. The other wouldn't focus, zoom or iris. I was "given" the bad one. I found the alloy block with motors at lens had cut most of the tracks at each corner of flexible PCB/Cable. So with 500W of light, jeweller's monocle and large magnifier on stand I repaired the cable by scratching and tinning the track traces on thin plastic either side of cracks, super glue a very fine piece of tinned wire across crack.At 3rd attempt and nearly a week I got it all working. Still works today though about 2minutes battery life!

The deliberate aim was to have a flip over cassette:1) Familiar like audio compact cassette.2) potentially no rewinding.

1" or 3/4" tape was deemed too big. So the idea of dynamic track following to shrink it to 1/4" per side. It wasn't blank tape cost that killed it. It was simply too late, so rare that video libraries had the format. By then Video rental was becoming as important as home taping. It would be some years in the future before studios realised direct retail sales at low price was a good strategy.

The Compact Cassette wiped out the slightly older 8 Track cartridge (Lear Jet?), very fast in Europe though compared to USA. Of course an 8 Track cartridge is an endless loop and can't rewind at all, so not comparable to VHS or Betamax or the earlier Japanese single reel Video cartridge (Stiff self lacing leader and takeup spool inside the machine, not cartridge. Pressing Eject fully rewound it first obviously).

Otherwise better with a single sided 1/2" tape.They already had done the N1500 and N1700 long before VHS and Betamax. It used the two spools stacked, for those too young to remember, to have fat stubby cartridge.

Red to black wrote:Philips might have done better with a quarter inch tape recording in one direction only.

Philips was an excellent example of how to cock things up completely. In the 70s, they had 100% of the European domestic video market with the VCR system. A few years later and they had around 0%, having gone to sleep when VHS and Betamax appeared. By the time Video 2000 appeared, VHS had cornered the market. I don't think it would have made any difference what format they chose. They were just too late.

Because the improvement vs cost was perceived marginal by TV makers, and it makes a big improvement to S-VHS machines to separate Chroma and Luminance prior to recording as they are separately recorded. Not such an issue on non-S-VHS, I don't think most them (earlier anyway) had a comb filter.

Michael Watterson wrote:Because the improvement vs cost was perceived marginal by TV makers, and it makes a big improvement to S-VHS machines to separate Chroma and Luminance prior to recording as they are separately recorded.

As they also are on standard VHS tapes. The two signals are only recombined for playback, at least on consumer grade VHS machines.

That is why ordinary VHS tapes look much better when played back via the S-video output on a S-VHS machine.

I think it's very rare too to have Y/C S-video out on non- S-VHS machines, though it's very little extra cost and no doubt easily retro-fitted. Some S-VHS machines annoyingly have the Y/C out "hidden" on a SCART and only have a S-video mini-DIN socket for S-Video in. The cheap SCART to phono & S-Video sockets don't seem to be wired correct either.

Rod Snell of Snell & Willcox fame says he was the first to make a Y/C interface between a colour under record/playback system - U-matic - and a monitor. He produced modifications to U-matic machines which brought out the chroma and luminance separately to avoid the distortions caused by the filters necessary to combine the two signals to produce a composite signal. JVC were quick on the uptake and developed the S-VHS interface which became the standard for up-market systems.